Word: charmingly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ashore, half-dead, at Norfolk, the emigres found themselves in a swampy, slave-owning country where Negroes were "held in a state of debasement which astounds even the inhabitants of the [French] colonies." While noting that "nowhere does the English language have such sweetness and charm as on the lips of a pretty Virginian," Moreau found nothing pretty in the character of Virginia men, who "cultivated extremely long fingernails, with which to scratch out the eyes of those with whom they fight...
Gunther also made a point of chinning with political hopefuls and has-beens as he went along. He writes of them vividly. He found New York's Governor Dewey "as devoid of charm as a rivet . . . able, dramatic . . . a man who will never try to steal second unless the pitcher breaks his leg." Taft is an amalgam of "brain power . . . sincerity . . . majestic wrongheadedness . . . Brobdingnagian bad judgments." Gunther on Bricker: "Intellectually he is like interstellar space-a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés." Gunther finds U.S. public life full of "poltroons, chiselers, parvenus . . . politicians bloated with...
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 5 (Reformation) (London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting; Victor, 7 sides). One of Mendelssohn's least attractive symphonies, in which the brassy ponderousness of the two outer movements smothers the charm and simplicity of the woodwinds in the two inner movements, done as attractively as possible by Sir Thomas. Performance: good...
...taken to a church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed...
...teacher opposes his bosses and wins over his pupils with the unpretentious methods of good sense, kindliness, and a talent for interesting children in singing. The picture is never as ambitious or exciting as the best of Torment, but it never loses its own particular low-keyed charm. Both films demonstrate the superiority of good sense over nonsense and are excellent sermons against big & little forms of tyranny...